voestalpine Stahl GmbH invited the Heureka! project consortium to Linz for a retrospection on the first year of the centre. The meeting commenced at 3:00 p.m. with an exciting tour of the voestalpine Stahlwelt exhibition, followed by presentations and a buffet. In detail, Heureka! researchers presented results on the following topics:

1. Research group head Michael Affenzeller summarized accomplishments of the first year and introduced the research branches.
2. Gabriel Kronberger presented new approaches for the evaluation of complex process models.
3. Stephan Winkler showed intermediate results on the analysis of medical data from clinical laboratory testing.
4. Finally, Monika Kofler gave an update on the progress in facility layout and warehouse optimization.

Michael Affenzeller would like to thank voestalpine for hosting the meeting and all attendees for their interest and insightful comments! Below are several pictures from the event.

Heureka researcher Andreas Beham is attending the Winter Simulation Conference 2009 in Austin, Texas this week. The Winter Simulation Conference is among the premier international conferences on system simulation and Andreas is using the opportunity to network with other researchers and to present recent research results on facility layout optimization .

The Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences (FH OÖ) honors outstanding scientists and scholars actively engaged in research in an annual award ceremony. We are delighted to announce that two prizes went to our research team this year: Michael Affenzeller was awared first place in the category Researcher of the Year and Stefan Wagner received the Junior Researcher Award 2009 for their contributions to the field of heuristic and evolutionary optimization. Congratulations!

A review of our book ("Genetic Algorithms and Genetic Programming - Modern Concepts and Practical Applications") has been published in Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. The reviewer, Gisele L. Pappa from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, points out that the book covers the basics of GA and GP for optimization and presents results of interesting research on new methods capable of preserving relevant building blocks; she also describes it as a good buy for students and researchers interested in genetic algorithms and their application in optimization problems! The full review is available online at SpringerLink.

Michael Affenzeller is today presenting the Ressel Centre for Heuristic Optimization Heureka! at the annual ÖGM Meeting in Graz, Austria.

Stephan Winkler is going to present the paper Heuristic Modeling of the Mental Progress of Persons with Normal Brain Aging, Subjective Cognitive Impairment, Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementia Disorders at the 21st European Modeling und Simulation Symposium (EMSS 2009). The work presented is a joint contribution between Stephan Winkler and Michael Affenzeller from the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences, Hagenberg, Austria, Stefanie Auer and Yvonne Donabauer from the M·A·S Alzheimerhilfe, Bad Ischl, Austria and Barry Reisberg from the Department of Psychiatry of the New York University Langone Medical Center, NY, USA.

The next international workshop on nature inspired distributed computing (NIDISC'2010) is being held during the International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from April 19-23, 2010. The workshop covers the following topics:

• Nature-inspired methods (e.g. ant colonies, GAs, cellular automata, DNA and molecular computing, local search, etc) for problem solving environments.
• Parallel and distributed metaheuristics techniques (algorithms, technologies and tools).
• Applications combining traditional parallel and distributed computing and optimization techniques as well as theoretical issues (convergence, complexity, etc).
• Other algorithms and applications relating the above mentioned research areas.

Interested researchers should refer to the NIDISC website and submit their contributions until December, 4th 2009.

The LINDI 2009 conference is taking place in Linz. The conference deals with topics in the field of logistics and industrial informatics and is organized by the Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences. The proceedings are published by IEEE.

We are proude to announce that an article written by members of the HeuristicLab team has been published in Springer's journal Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines (GPEM). The paper "Using enhanced genetic programming techniques for evolving classifiers in the context of medical diagnosis" by Stephan Winkler, Michael Affenzeller, and Stefan Wagner has appeared in GPEM, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 111-140; this article can be retrieved online via Springer's online portal.

Coming back from the presentation and conferment of the Microsoft Innovation Award 09 we are happy to announce that we have received the 2nd price! Among a total of 64 submitted projects HeuristicLab was perceived as one of the three most innovative software projects by both an expert jury and a public audience. We are of course very happy about such a recognition and the award itself, which was presented by Austria's Federal Minister for Science and Research Dr. Johannes Hahn.

During the event we were able to show HeuristicLab to interested people and talk about its possibilities and applications. Below you can find pictures of the conferment and the event and a video where research group head Michael Affenzeller talks about HeuristicLab (german).